Tag Archives: knitting

Steve got cold. So I made him a sweater. Actually, truth be told, I wanted to practise a few new knitting stitches I just learned off the all-knowing Internet (see below in italics), so I started this knitting swatch** – and then I thought, I don’t want to just make a random useless piece of knitting, so I turned it into a bear sweater. Steve seems to appreciate it.

Front: shape collar a little bit by leaving the middle stitches on the needle in the last couple of rows instead of knitting right across. It’s not a very good system; you could just not bother with the shaping, too.

You now have a sleeveless sweater that you could make your bear wear as is, or you could carry on to add

Sleeves:

Pick up 20 sts along sleeve hole (I ended up picking up 18 and making a couple of extra in the first round)

Knit 8 rounds stockinette

Knit 4 rounds rib stitch

Bind off with stretchy bind-off

Tidy up loose ends, make bear model sweater for social media feed.

(*A note on “Eastern stitch” or “Combination stitch”: I discovered it by a fluke quite recently, courtesy of one of the Offspring. I despise regular purl stitch and avoid it as much as possible, as it’s both awkward and I can never get an even tension on it. The Eastern purl does away with both of those problems for me. However, it makes the stitches lie backwards on the needle, so you have to adjust the corresponding knit stitch by knitting into the back of the loop instead of the front. Easy enough to do, and the result is very effective.)

So there you are – now your bear, too, can have his very own stylish winter sweater. For Steve, it was just in time – the thermometer suddenly dropped by some 15° over the weekend, and the winter we thought we weren’t having this year hit us in the back of the knees with a vengeance. Warm sweaters and socks are mandatory.

**Another note: so you don’t get the impression that I’m some kind of amazing knit-wit who regularly crafts fantastic stitchery, let me just say that my knitting is haphazard and goes in very irregular spurts. I’ve been known to take years to get a project done, because often I won’t touch it for months on end (I’ll tell you about the nine-year-sweater some other time…). Then suddenly, usually with the onset of cold weather, I might get bitten by the knitting bug, and off I go again for a little while, until my knitting enthusiasm fizzles out for another stretch. Also, I do plain knitting – one colour (or preferably, lots of colours all in one ball of yarn) and as much basic knit stich as possible so I don’t have to pay too much attention. I’m a lazy and irregular knitter – but I have fun with it, which is the whole point. One of these days I’d love to learn how to spin…

Mornin’, all. Steve’s been reminding me that it’s been a while since you all had an update on how he’s doing, so I figured I’d better humour him.

His big news is that he just had a labelectomy. What’s that, you ask? Oh, it’s this thing that happens in Stuffed-Animal-Land, when you have your manufacturer’s labels cut off your rear end. Steve didn’t mind them so much, but they did make him self-conscious about his back view:

So we finally took the plunge and gave him the snip. He’s hanging in there.

In other news, he’s pleased about this year’s choice of NaNoWriMo project: an adaptation of “Snow White and Rose Red”, a fairy tale that prominently features a bear. Originally I was going to work on Septimus Book 5, but then a friend suggested that we both do an adaptation of a fairy tale – the same fairy tale – so how could I resist? I think my friend is doing a SciFi; mine is going to be a contemporary mystery/romance (I hope). Needless to say, my Snow White and Rose Red are not going to be a set of fraternal twins, one blonde and one brunette, who are so sickeningly sweet and good and domestic they should have the Diabetes Association called on them.

Oh, if you want to join us in doing a “Snow White and Rose Red” for NaNoWriMo, please do! We could have a whole SWRR club.

Otherwise, in honour of #Socktober I finally got back to the socks I had on the knitting needles for the last year or so, and even finished the first one of the pair:

I was watching “Snow White and Rose Red” movies while I was knitting, so it counts as research. Youtube has quite a few Sonntagsmärchen – Sunday Fairy Tales – to watch. Did I mention the blonde-and-brunette convention? Urr, yeah – and in the 1955 version, the prince is called Prinz Goldhaar (Prince Golden Hair) to boot, and looks exactly how you’d expect him to with that name. Bring on the insulin. Good thing he spends most of the story in a bear suit! It’s still a fun movie, though. The 2012 version isn’t bad, either; in that one Rose Red swings a freshly-sharpened axe (which the actress apparently has never done in real life, judging by her completely inefficient grip on the thing), and doesn’t want to get married but travel the world and have adventures.

One of things that’s fun about fairy tale movies is that barring the changing definitions of “handsome” (coughPrinceGoldhairCough), they’re timeless. Which is exactly what a fairy tale ought to be – what a fairy tale is. “Once upon a time” is now, is never, is a long time ago or just last week, or maybe tomorrow. Somewhere in the woods, there is a cottage with a mother and two sisters, and during a winter’s storm there comes a knock on the door, and in stumbles a big black bear…

Steve says I better make the bear the hero of the piece, that’s what it’s all about. I’ll have to have a talk with him; he has a one-track mind on these matters. But that’s bears for you.

Life, the Universe, Bears and Socks and Labelectomies. And fairy tales, too.

Project Unstick advanced to the coat closet yesterday. And in amongst the random mess of mittens, scarves, sun hats, broken umbrellas, and dozens of mismatched stretchy gloves that were crammed into the shelf above the coat rack, I found a pair of slippers I knitted a few years ago. Unfortunately, something got into the stuff and chewed holes into the slippers, so they’re kind of useless now.

However, they inspired me to dig up the blog post I wrote about knitting them, just a few weeks after I first started blogging. And re-reading it, I thought it’d be worth re-posting. Even though the slippers can’t be worn any more, the insight I got from the process of making them is still, dare I say, kind of profound-ish. Here it is:

27 August 2010

Lost Pattern

It’s raining today. And I’ve got a rotten head cold. So, instead of doing the headless-chicken impression that I had planned on for today (a.k.a. cleaning the house), I’m just going to do not-much-of-anything. I pulled out my knitting again, because to me, knitting is a bit of a not-much-of-anything activity. Stitch after stitch after stitch, bit by bit – it’s a very inefficient way to produce clothing. But as a meditation technique it has a lot going for it.

Here’s a project I’ve had on the needles for some time. It’s meant to be a pair of slippers when it’s finished. A number of simple squares in garter stitch, attached to each other, rather like a scarf with a couple of extra pieces sticking out the sides. Then there’s supposed to be some rather complicated bit of folding-and-sewing trickery, attaching the corner of square number one to the edge of square number three-and-a-half and so on, and you’re meant to end up with something that keeps your toes toasty.

The only problem is that I’ve lost the pattern. I found it in a library book, and copied it out by hand on a piece of paper – I even drew the picture of how it’s supposed to look, and coloured it in with felt pens. I returned the book, knitted the first slipper (but didn’t sew it together yet) – and then lost the paper. It just went AWOL. And for the life of me I can’t remember what the book was called. So I know how to knit the piece – I can just follow the pattern of the first one – but I have no idea how it’s meant to be finished any more.

A lost pattern. But the project is still going. And working on it like that, without knowing if I’ll ever be able to really finish it, rather emphasises the zen aspect of the whole experience. I’m knitting for the sake of knitting, not for the sake of having finished slippers to wear at the end. It’s quite a useful discipline.

Isn’t it also rather like life, in some ways? We’re doing things a certain way because once, we had a pattern for it, we had a goal. Now the pattern is lost, but we still carry on doing it the same way, because now the aim of doing it has changed. Now I knit because I enjoy the sensation of the yarn sliding through my fingers, the slow rhythm of the needles poking, looping, clicking, poking again.

Actually, in the back of my mind, I still hope, faintly, that I’ll find that book again. Or that someone will know the pattern, and can tell me. Or that, in experimenting with the finished pieces, I’ll remember how it was supposed to go. So in working on that piece of knitting, I work on hope. Not anticipation – just a vague thought that maybe I’ll be able to finish this after all. But I won’t worry about it now. For now, I’ll just stitch. Bit by bit. Whenever I feel like it, or I have a head cold.

Life, the universe, lost patterns, and hope. I’ll let you know if the slippers ever get finished.

The slippers did get finished, thanks to a friend who commented on the post with a link to a pattern (here); and I wrote another post about that, too (“Loose Ends”, here). I didn’t wear the slippers much, but I do hope the moths or whatever it was that made the holes enjoyed their snack.

And now I want to sit down and knit some more… Maybe another pair of slippers? Or I could finally finish the scarf or the pair of socks I’ve had on the needles for a while. Not as long as the nine-year-sweater, though – but that one is a story for another rainy day.

Life, the Universe, and the Philosophy of Lost Patterns. Still something to be said for that.